Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ on Paramount+, a Surprisingly Poignant Apocalyptic Thriller Anchored by Lupita Nyong’o (And Her Cat!)

A Quiet Place: Day One (now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) sees director Michael Sarnoski – of Pig (starring Nicolas Cage) fame – taking over for franchise creator John Krasinski (who probably should’ve helmed this instead of maudlin-ass kid movie IF). And yes, as the title implies, it’s a prequel to the 2018 and 2021 hit sci-fi/horror films, the second of which already showed us what happened on Day One of the invasion of Earth by genocidal aliens who can’t see but can hear really well and therefore force everyone to be, as Elmer Fudd would put it, as siwent as possibwe. But at least Day One shows us a DIFFERENT day one, one that stars Lupita Nyong’o and an impossibly adorable cat. Now let’s hope this movie doesn’t make us go “woof.” 

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The movie opens with a title card stating something about how New York City consistently hums at 90 decibels, like “a constant scream.” Neat fact! Does it tie into the movie’s themes? Not particularly well! But it’s neat! From here, Nyong’o will attempt to ruin my attempts to make fun of this movie with the type of thoroughly moving performance we should expect from her by now, although the cat will lighten things considerably by being cute, doing the squinty-eyed purring thing and acting like the most impossibly extraordinary and enduring cat in the history of the world. 

Nyong’o plays a terminal cancer patient named Samira, who lives in a hospice-care center. Her closest confidant is Frodo, a little white fuzzface with black spots played by two puddies named Schnitzel and Nico. (I’d say I’m dying over here, just dying, if it didn’t seem disrespectful to a character who’s actually dying, and is so well-portrayed, she deserves that respect.) Frodo is her comfort animal. She takes him everywhere, in her arms or on a little leash. Good one. A cat on a leash? Have you ever tried that? I have. It was unpleasant, for me, the cat, the leash and anyone in the audial range of a 90-dB constant scream. Hollywood!

Anyway. We meet Samira during a group-therapy session led by care worker Reuben (Alex Wolff). She’s a poet, and, asked to share a poem, she obliges with a piece she calls “This Place is Shit.” Safe to say she’s not in a good place mentally. Reuben coaxes her into joining the field trip to New York City, promising they’ll stop at her all-time favorite pizza place since childhood, Patsy’s, for a slice on the way back. The bus passes over the bridge and we get a lovely, romantic shot of the bustling city, and the moment needs to be savored because it’s pretty close to being All Over. The hospice residents settle into a little theater for a puppet show, and Samira, far from amused by this, sneaks out, but not before we recognize that she’s sitting in the row ahead of Henri (Djimon Hounsou), who we know is a character in A Quiet Place Part II. Small world! 

As Samira grabs a candy bar from the bodega next door, Frodo under her arm, weird things start happening. Sirens and vague noises off in the distance and the like. Reuben says everyone’s gotta go, and there’s no time for Patsy’s pizza. Samira’s pissed, but the feeling passes quickly when projectiles begin cutting through the Earth’s atmosphere and smashing into the city. Hell breaks loose. She’s knocked out by a flurry of madness and awakens with some people who are all sitting silently in a room. QUIET PLEASE! ALIENS AT WORK! Don’t worry: Frodo’s OK. Someone grabbed him, and he’s quickly reunited with the person he owns. 

This group of folks won’t stay together long though, because there’s more insanity coming, and plenty of it. Samira ends up on her own – with Frodo, of course – walking against a crowd that’s headed to the docks for a rescue boat but makes too much collective shuffling noise and ends up getting scattered and/or splattered by the spidery aliens. She meets a British guy named Eric (Joseph Quinn), who emerges from a flooded subway corridor, gasping and shellshocked. They comfort each other for a minute, and they talk safely and quietly under the din of a rainstorm. Why isn’t she headed toward the docks? Because she’s dying anyway, and wants one last slice from Patsy’s. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Quiet Places are kinda the eerie-silence bits from 28 Days Later stretched into a concept – crossed with Alien/Aliens, Signs and Bird Box.

Performance Worth Watching: Nyong’o – never, ever not good, even in generic Liam Neeson action movies – suffuses her character with such deep, existential empathy, you often forget that she’s anchoring the latest in a series of movies riddled with plot holes. 

Memorable Dialogue: “SHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Let’s talk about the most important component of Day One: the cat. He has the doglike tendency to follow his human even when he’s off leash, he somehow survives a harrowing stint underwater, he doesn’t dig in his claws and leap out of Samira’s arms when all heck breaks loose and always turns up afterwards, and, miraculously, he doesn’t hiss and arch and yowl at hideous space gorgons from hell when they show up to dismember folks. (I used to have an utterly unflappable cat who was so easygoing and malleable of personality I could cradle him like a baby and rub his tummy for hours. I nicknamed him The Perfect Cat, but he was nothing compared to Frodo. My little bugger never took to the leash.) Frodo isn’t just a cute thing to coo at – Sarnoski uses him as comic relief, a source of tension and a visual throughline. When we feel disoriented by the chaos, the director returns to the cat to reorient us; for a moment or two after a particularly destructive sequence, we cynically resign ourselves to never seeing him again, but there he is, popping up among the wreckage, no worse for wear. He’s a ridiculously adorable symbol of hope and perseverance: Hang in there baby! 

The cat also distracts us a little from the fact that Earth seems to be in hospice now. Without Frodo, this is heavy, potentially oppressive subject matter. Our protagonist, who we love because she’s played by Lupita Nyong’o – well, even if she lives through this, she’s not going to live through that. The actress effortlessly compels us to be involved in Samira’s quest for a little closure, one last bit of joy before you know happens, and the Eric character is our analog in the sense that we too might risk our own lives to help her. Along the way, Sarnoski – jumping from a critically acclaimed indie drama to a summer tentpole with a fair amount of artistic cred intact – devises and executes the familiar, but effectively harrowing, action-survival sequences we expect from this series, and many other apocalypse thrillers we’ve seen before. Two scenes, one set in a flooded train corridor and the other in what’s either an alien egg-hatchery or cafeteria (can’t tell which!), evoke Aliens in all the right ways.

Some will grouse that Day One isn’t truly Quiet Place enough, that it simply uses the stay-quiet-or-die concept as a backdrop for a human story that would fit into a variety of conceptual scenarios. I frankly commend Sarnoski – who wrote the screenplay, with Krasinski getting story credit – for not giving a good god damn about the concept. Concepts don’t make movies great; good stories and characters do. Now, he could’ve done a better job of incorporating the silence-is-golden franchise M.O. thematically into Samira’s story, perhaps. Then again, in any extreme circumstance, tangential stories like this emerge to make one better appreciate the power of the human spirit, forced literary poignancy be damned. We should relish the profound irony of a woman who fights to survive despite being terminally ill, so she can experience something she loves so very much, one last time. It turns a potentially fatalistic story into one of hope. To all the haters of this movie, I have one thing to say: Meow.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A Quiet Place: Day One surpasses expectations for a B/B-minus franchise, going hyper-focused and resisting the urge to go bigger and broader and explain, explain, explain all the whys and wherefores of what’s happening. It’s the best of the three films, by far.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.